In 1978, two of South Korea’s most famous filmmakers were kidnapped on the orders of Kim Jong-il. Their years in North Korea led to awards, a giant monster movie, and a daring escape...
This is the extraordinary story of cinema, propaganda, and a dictator obsessed with making better films.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part three of our three-part mini-series on the theme of “stories from North Korea”.
[00:00:31] In case you missed them, in part one, we told the story of Otto Warmbier, the American student who went to North Korea as a tourist and never really came home.
[00:00:44] In part two, we talked about one of the most brazen assassinations of the 21st century: the murder of Kim Jong-un’s half-brother in Kuala Lumpur airport.
[00:00:56] And today, we are going to talk about Kim Jong-il: the dictator, the film fanatic, and the kidnapper of two of South Korea's most famous entertainers.
[00:01:09] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:15] It’s January 1978.
[00:01:18] A woman called Choi Eun-hee is travelling to Hong Kong. She is one of the most famous actresses in South Korea, a household name, a star of dozens of films. She has been invited to Hong Kong by a contact who has told her about an exciting opportunity: a new film project, and the possibility of running a performing arts academy.
[00:01:47] It sounds promising.
[00:01:49] Her career has been going through a difficult patch, and she is keen to hear more.
[00:01:57] She is taken to a place called Repulse Bay. It is a beautiful beach on the southern coast of Hong Kong island.
[00:02:07] Shortly after she arrives, without warning, she is grabbed by a group of men. She is bundled into a speedboat. Before she can understand what is happening, she is out on the open water, speeding away from Hong Kong.
[00:02:26] Eight days later, she arrives at a port in North Korea.
[00:02:32] She has been kidnapped. And the person who ordered her kidnapping is not a spy chief, not a general, not a faceless bureaucrat. It is Kim Jong-il, the son of North Korea's founder, and the man who will one day become the country's supreme leader.
[00:02:54] He wanted an actress. So he took one.
[00:02:58] Now, to understand why Kim Jong-il might have done this, we need to understand something about the man himself.
[00:03:07] Kim Jong-il was born in 1941, and grew up in the shadow of his father, Kim Il-sung, the all-powerful founder of the North Korean state.
[00:03:21] As you will know, propaganda has always been vital for North Korea, and film has long been one of its most important tools.
[00:03:32] The elder Kim, Kim Il-sung, was keen that his son and heir receive an appropriate education in how to make it.
[00:03:43] So, from his early childhood, he was taken to film studios, introduced to directors and actors, and exposed to the machinery of propaganda production. It didn’t seem to put him off, and he developed what can only be described as an all-consuming passion for cinema.
[00:04:07] By the time he was an adult, he had assembled a personal film collection of around 20,000 titles: everything from James Bond films to the complete works of Elizabeth Taylor, Rambo, Friday the 13th, and all the Academy Award winners.
[00:04:29] Of course, these weren’t available to the North Korean public — foreign films were banned — but the same rules didn’t apply to the Kim family.
[00:04:39] And he would watch these films obsessively, often several in a single sitting.
[00:04:47] But he did not think of himself merely as a consumer. He saw himself as a critic too.
[00:04:55] This even led him to write a book about film theory called On the Art of the Cinema.
[00:05:04] As you might expect of anything the son of Kim Il-sung produced, it was heaped with praise in North Korea, and came to be regarded as the authoritative guide to filmmaking.
[00:05:18] Outside North Korea the reaction was rather less enthusiastic. But perhaps surprisingly enough, even some Western reviewers admitted that it wasn’t all rubbish, and there were some interesting points.
[00:05:34] Kim, it turned out, did know what he was talking about.
[00:05:40] He was also put directly in charge of North Korea's film industry, functioning essentially as the country's chief producer and screenwriter. Every film made in North Korea passed through his hands.
[00:05:56] And he was deeply, painfully, dissatisfied with what his country's studios were producing.
[00:06:04] North Korean cinema, by the 1970s, was exactly what you might expect from a totalitarian state with essentially zero connection to the outside world: stiff, joyless, and relentlessly ideological.
[00:06:21] Every film was a vehicle for propaganda. Every story ended with the triumph of the collective over the individual, the wisdom of the party and the Kim family, and the heroism of the Korean people.
[00:06:37] From a cinematic perspective, it was not exactly Oscar-winning material.
[00:06:43] People also seemed to be constantly bursting out in tears.
[00:06:48] Kim couldn’t quite understand why, and would reportedly complain about this to his directors, telling them that “this isn’t a funeral”.
[00:06:58] Now, for all of his many faults, Kim Jong-il knew a good film when he saw one.
[00:07:06] And he knew the films coming out of North Korea were bad.
[00:07:12] He wanted North Korea to have a film industry that the world would respect, films that could be entered into international festivals and win prizes, films that would make the world look at North Korea differently.
[00:07:29] He knew that what the country was currently producing didn’t stand a chance.
[00:07:35] The problem, he believed, was talent; the country simply didn’t have the directors, producers or actors to make anything decent.
[00:07:47] North Korean filmmakers had long since learned to produce exactly what the state expected: cautious, formulaic propaganda films, often with plenty of tears.
[00:08:01] To be fair, you can understand why. They had no experience of the world beyond North Korea, no understanding of what audiences elsewhere responded to, and no freedom to experiment. If creating something bold and new might mean you get sentenced to decades in a labour camp, well, it’s hardly surprising the machine kept on churning out the same old junk year after year.
[00:08:30] The solution Kim Jong-il arrived at was, in its logic, quite straightforward.
[00:08:37] If North Korean talent was not up to the task, well, he would get talent from elsewhere.
[00:08:45] The most obvious place to look was just across the border. South Korea had a booming film industry which had produced exactly the kind of internationally recognised directors and stars that Kim wanted.
[00:09:00] The director he had in mind was a man called Shin Sang-ok.
[00:09:06] Shin Sang-ok was, by any measure, a remarkable figure. He is often described as the Orson Welles of South Korea. He cut his teeth during the so-called “golden years” of South Korean cinema, in the 1950s and 1960s, and would go on to produce more than 70 films.
[00:09:29] He had founded his own studio, was internationally recognised, he was a huge name.
[00:09:37] He was also, by 1978, in a difficult position.
[00:09:43] His studio had been shut down by the South Korean government, which had grown uncomfortable with some of his work. His career had stalled.
[00:09:54] And on a personal level, things weren’t particularly rosy either.
[00:10:01] His wife of 22 years had divorced him, after finding out about a series of affairs and infidelities. Clearly, this must have been difficult, as it would have been for anyone.
[00:10:15] But this was made even more so by the fact that his now ex-wife, a woman called Choi Eun-hee, had been the lead actress in many of his films.
[00:10:28] This, of course, was the same Choi you heard about at the start of the episode.
[00:10:35] Kim Jong-il knew all of this. And he had a plan.
[00:10:42] The plan didn’t start with a telephone call to Shin and promises that a spell in North Korea would give his career the boost it so desperately needed; persuasion wasn’t exactly Kim’s style.
[00:10:56] The plan began with Choi, Shin’s ex-wife. She was the easier target, and her abduction would serve as bait.
[00:11:07] Once she had disappeared, Kim thought, Shin would come looking for her. And when he did, they would take him too.
[00:11:18] And that is precisely what happened.
[00:11:22] Shin Sang-ok heard that his ex-wife had disappeared in Hong Kong. He was worried, and he flew there to investigate. North Korean agents were waiting. He was seized, put on a boat, and taken to North Korea.
[00:11:40] He wasn’t told that Choi was already there. And in fact, she would have no idea that he was there for several years.
[00:11:50] What followed, for both of them, was an ordeal that combined elements of luxury captivity, political re-education, imprisonment and, eventually, something resembling a forced professional collaboration.
[00:12:07] Choi's experience in the early years was more comfortable than Shin's.
[00:12:12] She was housed in a well-kept villa, taken to films and operas and parties, given a private tutor to teach her about North Korean ideology, and treated, in certain respects, as a guest rather than a prisoner.
[00:12:30] Kim Jong-il asked her for her opinions on films. He took notes. He wanted to learn from her. He also, it appears, enjoyed her company. She must have been something of a breath of fresh air.
[00:12:45] Shin's experience was considerably worse.
[00:12:49] He tried to escape twice. On the second attempt, he was caught just twenty five kilometres from the Chinese border. He had almost made it, but it wasn’t to be.
[00:13:03] He was sent to a political prison, where he spent more than two years being subjected to interrogation, starvation, and ideological re-education. This involved, as he would later recall, hours upon hours of propaganda films, political lectures, and being forced to write confessions of his ideological errors.
[00:13:29] And then, in March 1983, Kim Jong-il threw a dinner party.
[00:13:37] Both Choi and Shin were brought to the same room. Neither knew the other was in North Korea, and of course, neither of them had had any access to the outside world, no way to know anything about the fate of the other.
[00:13:56] The reunion was deeply emotional. The pair stood looking at each other, unsure what would happen next. And then, moments later, Kim Jong-il walked in.
[00:14:11] He was, by the accounts of both Shin and Choi, not what they had expected.
[00:14:17] Yes, he looked like his official photos: short in stature, platform shoes, and with that fluffy, bouffant hair.
[00:14:27] But he was also energetic, full of strong opinions, and in his own way, kind of charming. He apologised for the circumstances of their arrival. He expressed his admiration for their work. He explained his vision for North Korean cinema and what he hoped they would help him achieve.
[00:14:52] He also, rather extraordinarily, suggested they remarry. He planned to officiate the ceremony himself. They had little choice but to agree, and the wedding took place the following month.
[00:15:08] And then the work began.
[00:15:10] From 1984 to 1985, Shin Sang-ok directed seven films in North Korea.
[00:15:18] Kim Jong-il gave him resources he had not had in years: a studio, a budget, a crew, and, crucially, a degree of creative freedom that had never previously been afforded to his filmmakers.
[00:15:33] Although he was, of course, the dictator of a harsh, authoritarian regime, Kim understood on some level that if he wanted North Korean films to be able to compete internationally, he needed to loosen the reins a little bit. If every scene, every frame, was dictated by strict propaganda requirements, even the best filmmaker in the world wouldn’t be able to produce anything decent.
[00:16:03] And the results were, well, they were pretty good.
[00:16:08] A film called Salt, which was directed by Shin and starred Choi, it won Choi the best actress prize at the 1985 Moscow International Film Festival.
[00:16:21] Another was entered into a festival in what was then Czechoslovakia.
[00:16:26] For a brief, strange period, North Korean cinema was producing work that was being noticed.
[00:16:35] But the most famous work from this period was the 1985 epic monster film, Pulgasari.
[00:16:45] It's a film modelled on the Japanese classic Godzilla, in which a giant iron-eating creature is summoned by a dying blacksmith and goes on to help a peasant rebellion.
[00:16:59] Shin brought in special effects technicians from the Japanese studio that made the original Godzilla films, and even hired the actor who wore the Godzilla costume in Japan.
[00:17:13] In terms of collaboration, it is a real historical peculiarity: a North Korean propaganda film made by a kidnapped South Korean director using a Japanese special effects team.
[00:17:29] It has become, in its way, a cult classic.
[00:17:34] It is also a monument to the sheer strangeness of what was happening in those years in Pyongyang.
[00:17:42] But, no matter the resources they were afforded and the international acclaim they may have been starting to receive, Shin and Choi had no intention of spending the rest of their lives in North Korea.
[00:17:57] Ever since that first dinner party, the pair had been quietly planning their escape.
[00:18:04] The opportunity came in 1986. Kim Jong-il sent Shin and Choi to Vienna, in Austria, to seek financial backing for a new international co-production: a film about Genghis Khan.
[00:18:21] The trip was supervised by North Korean minders, of course. But it was Vienna. It was the outside world.
[00:18:30] During a meeting with a journalist, the minders agreed to wait outside and give them some privacy. The couple seized the opportunity. They ran out and jumped into a taxi.
[00:18:45] But there was heavy traffic, and they could see their minders frantically rushing towards them.
[00:18:53] If they were caught, well, they would no doubt be on the first plane back to North Korea, sent straight to a prison camp, and would never be allowed out of the country again.
[00:19:06] The couple decided their only chance was on foot. They got out of the taxi and sprinted towards the American embassy.
[00:19:17] They made it, and immediately sought political asylum, saying that they had been kidnapped; they hadn’t gone to the north voluntarily, as they had previously publicly stated.
[00:19:29] Kim Jong-il, of course, was furious. He accused them of embezzling money intended for the Genghis Khan film, 3 million dollars. He banned all their North Korean films from being shown in the country.
[00:19:46] The work they had spent years producing was, from the regime's perspective, now toxic.
[00:19:55] As for Shin and Choi, they spent a couple of years in the United States living quietly under protection.
[00:20:03] But quietly didn't mean inactively.
[00:20:07] They had spent years closer to Kim Jong-il than almost any outsider ever had, sharing meals with him, discussing film, and watching him hold court. And Western intelligence agencies were extremely keen to understand what that experience had revealed about the man.
[00:20:30] And it turned out that Shin and Choi had been preparing for exactly this moment.
[00:20:37] Throughout their time in captivity, they had been carefully and secretly recording their conversations with Kim Jong-il, not primarily for intelligence purposes, but to protect themselves, To have proof, if they ever made it out, that they had not gone north voluntarily.
[00:20:59] Using a hidden device, they captured hours of him talking about film, about North Korea, about his own frustrations with the country's cultural output.
[00:21:11] Unguarded, candid, speaking freely to people he trusted.
[00:21:18] One American official who heard the tapes said his jaw dropped. Western intelligence had never heard Kim Jong-il speak before, let alone privately and unguarded. It was, he said, an intelligence windfall.
[00:21:37] After a few years in the United States, the couple returned to South Korea. Shin died in 2006, while Choi, his ex-wife turned wife once more, died in 2018.
[00:21:53] They had been taken from their lives, separated for years, imprisoned, forced to remarry, and put to work for a dictator's vanity project. And yet, in a strange way, the years in Pyongyang produced some of the most interesting work of Shin's career.
[00:22:14] A widely acclaimed monster film made with a special effects team from Japan.
[00:22:21] A best actress prize in Moscow.
[00:22:24] Secret recordings of one of the most secretive men on earth.
[00:22:29] And as for Kim Jong-il, he got his films. He just didn't get to keep them.
[00:22:37] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Kim Jong-il and the kidnapped South Korean filmmakers, and with that comes an end to this three-part mini-series on the theme of North Korea.
[00:22:51] South Korea is quite a popular country for this show; North Korea, unsurprisingly, isn’t.
[00:22:57] But if you are from the Korean peninsula, I’d love to know your thoughts. Do you remember the events in this mini-series? And what do you think might lie ahead for the future of North Korea?
[00:23:09] I’d love to know your thoughts, and the place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:23:17] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:22] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part three of our three-part mini-series on the theme of “stories from North Korea”.
[00:00:31] In case you missed them, in part one, we told the story of Otto Warmbier, the American student who went to North Korea as a tourist and never really came home.
[00:00:44] In part two, we talked about one of the most brazen assassinations of the 21st century: the murder of Kim Jong-un’s half-brother in Kuala Lumpur airport.
[00:00:56] And today, we are going to talk about Kim Jong-il: the dictator, the film fanatic, and the kidnapper of two of South Korea's most famous entertainers.
[00:01:09] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:15] It’s January 1978.
[00:01:18] A woman called Choi Eun-hee is travelling to Hong Kong. She is one of the most famous actresses in South Korea, a household name, a star of dozens of films. She has been invited to Hong Kong by a contact who has told her about an exciting opportunity: a new film project, and the possibility of running a performing arts academy.
[00:01:47] It sounds promising.
[00:01:49] Her career has been going through a difficult patch, and she is keen to hear more.
[00:01:57] She is taken to a place called Repulse Bay. It is a beautiful beach on the southern coast of Hong Kong island.
[00:02:07] Shortly after she arrives, without warning, she is grabbed by a group of men. She is bundled into a speedboat. Before she can understand what is happening, she is out on the open water, speeding away from Hong Kong.
[00:02:26] Eight days later, she arrives at a port in North Korea.
[00:02:32] She has been kidnapped. And the person who ordered her kidnapping is not a spy chief, not a general, not a faceless bureaucrat. It is Kim Jong-il, the son of North Korea's founder, and the man who will one day become the country's supreme leader.
[00:02:54] He wanted an actress. So he took one.
[00:02:58] Now, to understand why Kim Jong-il might have done this, we need to understand something about the man himself.
[00:03:07] Kim Jong-il was born in 1941, and grew up in the shadow of his father, Kim Il-sung, the all-powerful founder of the North Korean state.
[00:03:21] As you will know, propaganda has always been vital for North Korea, and film has long been one of its most important tools.
[00:03:32] The elder Kim, Kim Il-sung, was keen that his son and heir receive an appropriate education in how to make it.
[00:03:43] So, from his early childhood, he was taken to film studios, introduced to directors and actors, and exposed to the machinery of propaganda production. It didn’t seem to put him off, and he developed what can only be described as an all-consuming passion for cinema.
[00:04:07] By the time he was an adult, he had assembled a personal film collection of around 20,000 titles: everything from James Bond films to the complete works of Elizabeth Taylor, Rambo, Friday the 13th, and all the Academy Award winners.
[00:04:29] Of course, these weren’t available to the North Korean public — foreign films were banned — but the same rules didn’t apply to the Kim family.
[00:04:39] And he would watch these films obsessively, often several in a single sitting.
[00:04:47] But he did not think of himself merely as a consumer. He saw himself as a critic too.
[00:04:55] This even led him to write a book about film theory called On the Art of the Cinema.
[00:05:04] As you might expect of anything the son of Kim Il-sung produced, it was heaped with praise in North Korea, and came to be regarded as the authoritative guide to filmmaking.
[00:05:18] Outside North Korea the reaction was rather less enthusiastic. But perhaps surprisingly enough, even some Western reviewers admitted that it wasn’t all rubbish, and there were some interesting points.
[00:05:34] Kim, it turned out, did know what he was talking about.
[00:05:40] He was also put directly in charge of North Korea's film industry, functioning essentially as the country's chief producer and screenwriter. Every film made in North Korea passed through his hands.
[00:05:56] And he was deeply, painfully, dissatisfied with what his country's studios were producing.
[00:06:04] North Korean cinema, by the 1970s, was exactly what you might expect from a totalitarian state with essentially zero connection to the outside world: stiff, joyless, and relentlessly ideological.
[00:06:21] Every film was a vehicle for propaganda. Every story ended with the triumph of the collective over the individual, the wisdom of the party and the Kim family, and the heroism of the Korean people.
[00:06:37] From a cinematic perspective, it was not exactly Oscar-winning material.
[00:06:43] People also seemed to be constantly bursting out in tears.
[00:06:48] Kim couldn’t quite understand why, and would reportedly complain about this to his directors, telling them that “this isn’t a funeral”.
[00:06:58] Now, for all of his many faults, Kim Jong-il knew a good film when he saw one.
[00:07:06] And he knew the films coming out of North Korea were bad.
[00:07:12] He wanted North Korea to have a film industry that the world would respect, films that could be entered into international festivals and win prizes, films that would make the world look at North Korea differently.
[00:07:29] He knew that what the country was currently producing didn’t stand a chance.
[00:07:35] The problem, he believed, was talent; the country simply didn’t have the directors, producers or actors to make anything decent.
[00:07:47] North Korean filmmakers had long since learned to produce exactly what the state expected: cautious, formulaic propaganda films, often with plenty of tears.
[00:08:01] To be fair, you can understand why. They had no experience of the world beyond North Korea, no understanding of what audiences elsewhere responded to, and no freedom to experiment. If creating something bold and new might mean you get sentenced to decades in a labour camp, well, it’s hardly surprising the machine kept on churning out the same old junk year after year.
[00:08:30] The solution Kim Jong-il arrived at was, in its logic, quite straightforward.
[00:08:37] If North Korean talent was not up to the task, well, he would get talent from elsewhere.
[00:08:45] The most obvious place to look was just across the border. South Korea had a booming film industry which had produced exactly the kind of internationally recognised directors and stars that Kim wanted.
[00:09:00] The director he had in mind was a man called Shin Sang-ok.
[00:09:06] Shin Sang-ok was, by any measure, a remarkable figure. He is often described as the Orson Welles of South Korea. He cut his teeth during the so-called “golden years” of South Korean cinema, in the 1950s and 1960s, and would go on to produce more than 70 films.
[00:09:29] He had founded his own studio, was internationally recognised, he was a huge name.
[00:09:37] He was also, by 1978, in a difficult position.
[00:09:43] His studio had been shut down by the South Korean government, which had grown uncomfortable with some of his work. His career had stalled.
[00:09:54] And on a personal level, things weren’t particularly rosy either.
[00:10:01] His wife of 22 years had divorced him, after finding out about a series of affairs and infidelities. Clearly, this must have been difficult, as it would have been for anyone.
[00:10:15] But this was made even more so by the fact that his now ex-wife, a woman called Choi Eun-hee, had been the lead actress in many of his films.
[00:10:28] This, of course, was the same Choi you heard about at the start of the episode.
[00:10:35] Kim Jong-il knew all of this. And he had a plan.
[00:10:42] The plan didn’t start with a telephone call to Shin and promises that a spell in North Korea would give his career the boost it so desperately needed; persuasion wasn’t exactly Kim’s style.
[00:10:56] The plan began with Choi, Shin’s ex-wife. She was the easier target, and her abduction would serve as bait.
[00:11:07] Once she had disappeared, Kim thought, Shin would come looking for her. And when he did, they would take him too.
[00:11:18] And that is precisely what happened.
[00:11:22] Shin Sang-ok heard that his ex-wife had disappeared in Hong Kong. He was worried, and he flew there to investigate. North Korean agents were waiting. He was seized, put on a boat, and taken to North Korea.
[00:11:40] He wasn’t told that Choi was already there. And in fact, she would have no idea that he was there for several years.
[00:11:50] What followed, for both of them, was an ordeal that combined elements of luxury captivity, political re-education, imprisonment and, eventually, something resembling a forced professional collaboration.
[00:12:07] Choi's experience in the early years was more comfortable than Shin's.
[00:12:12] She was housed in a well-kept villa, taken to films and operas and parties, given a private tutor to teach her about North Korean ideology, and treated, in certain respects, as a guest rather than a prisoner.
[00:12:30] Kim Jong-il asked her for her opinions on films. He took notes. He wanted to learn from her. He also, it appears, enjoyed her company. She must have been something of a breath of fresh air.
[00:12:45] Shin's experience was considerably worse.
[00:12:49] He tried to escape twice. On the second attempt, he was caught just twenty five kilometres from the Chinese border. He had almost made it, but it wasn’t to be.
[00:13:03] He was sent to a political prison, where he spent more than two years being subjected to interrogation, starvation, and ideological re-education. This involved, as he would later recall, hours upon hours of propaganda films, political lectures, and being forced to write confessions of his ideological errors.
[00:13:29] And then, in March 1983, Kim Jong-il threw a dinner party.
[00:13:37] Both Choi and Shin were brought to the same room. Neither knew the other was in North Korea, and of course, neither of them had had any access to the outside world, no way to know anything about the fate of the other.
[00:13:56] The reunion was deeply emotional. The pair stood looking at each other, unsure what would happen next. And then, moments later, Kim Jong-il walked in.
[00:14:11] He was, by the accounts of both Shin and Choi, not what they had expected.
[00:14:17] Yes, he looked like his official photos: short in stature, platform shoes, and with that fluffy, bouffant hair.
[00:14:27] But he was also energetic, full of strong opinions, and in his own way, kind of charming. He apologised for the circumstances of their arrival. He expressed his admiration for their work. He explained his vision for North Korean cinema and what he hoped they would help him achieve.
[00:14:52] He also, rather extraordinarily, suggested they remarry. He planned to officiate the ceremony himself. They had little choice but to agree, and the wedding took place the following month.
[00:15:08] And then the work began.
[00:15:10] From 1984 to 1985, Shin Sang-ok directed seven films in North Korea.
[00:15:18] Kim Jong-il gave him resources he had not had in years: a studio, a budget, a crew, and, crucially, a degree of creative freedom that had never previously been afforded to his filmmakers.
[00:15:33] Although he was, of course, the dictator of a harsh, authoritarian regime, Kim understood on some level that if he wanted North Korean films to be able to compete internationally, he needed to loosen the reins a little bit. If every scene, every frame, was dictated by strict propaganda requirements, even the best filmmaker in the world wouldn’t be able to produce anything decent.
[00:16:03] And the results were, well, they were pretty good.
[00:16:08] A film called Salt, which was directed by Shin and starred Choi, it won Choi the best actress prize at the 1985 Moscow International Film Festival.
[00:16:21] Another was entered into a festival in what was then Czechoslovakia.
[00:16:26] For a brief, strange period, North Korean cinema was producing work that was being noticed.
[00:16:35] But the most famous work from this period was the 1985 epic monster film, Pulgasari.
[00:16:45] It's a film modelled on the Japanese classic Godzilla, in which a giant iron-eating creature is summoned by a dying blacksmith and goes on to help a peasant rebellion.
[00:16:59] Shin brought in special effects technicians from the Japanese studio that made the original Godzilla films, and even hired the actor who wore the Godzilla costume in Japan.
[00:17:13] In terms of collaboration, it is a real historical peculiarity: a North Korean propaganda film made by a kidnapped South Korean director using a Japanese special effects team.
[00:17:29] It has become, in its way, a cult classic.
[00:17:34] It is also a monument to the sheer strangeness of what was happening in those years in Pyongyang.
[00:17:42] But, no matter the resources they were afforded and the international acclaim they may have been starting to receive, Shin and Choi had no intention of spending the rest of their lives in North Korea.
[00:17:57] Ever since that first dinner party, the pair had been quietly planning their escape.
[00:18:04] The opportunity came in 1986. Kim Jong-il sent Shin and Choi to Vienna, in Austria, to seek financial backing for a new international co-production: a film about Genghis Khan.
[00:18:21] The trip was supervised by North Korean minders, of course. But it was Vienna. It was the outside world.
[00:18:30] During a meeting with a journalist, the minders agreed to wait outside and give them some privacy. The couple seized the opportunity. They ran out and jumped into a taxi.
[00:18:45] But there was heavy traffic, and they could see their minders frantically rushing towards them.
[00:18:53] If they were caught, well, they would no doubt be on the first plane back to North Korea, sent straight to a prison camp, and would never be allowed out of the country again.
[00:19:06] The couple decided their only chance was on foot. They got out of the taxi and sprinted towards the American embassy.
[00:19:17] They made it, and immediately sought political asylum, saying that they had been kidnapped; they hadn’t gone to the north voluntarily, as they had previously publicly stated.
[00:19:29] Kim Jong-il, of course, was furious. He accused them of embezzling money intended for the Genghis Khan film, 3 million dollars. He banned all their North Korean films from being shown in the country.
[00:19:46] The work they had spent years producing was, from the regime's perspective, now toxic.
[00:19:55] As for Shin and Choi, they spent a couple of years in the United States living quietly under protection.
[00:20:03] But quietly didn't mean inactively.
[00:20:07] They had spent years closer to Kim Jong-il than almost any outsider ever had, sharing meals with him, discussing film, and watching him hold court. And Western intelligence agencies were extremely keen to understand what that experience had revealed about the man.
[00:20:30] And it turned out that Shin and Choi had been preparing for exactly this moment.
[00:20:37] Throughout their time in captivity, they had been carefully and secretly recording their conversations with Kim Jong-il, not primarily for intelligence purposes, but to protect themselves, To have proof, if they ever made it out, that they had not gone north voluntarily.
[00:20:59] Using a hidden device, they captured hours of him talking about film, about North Korea, about his own frustrations with the country's cultural output.
[00:21:11] Unguarded, candid, speaking freely to people he trusted.
[00:21:18] One American official who heard the tapes said his jaw dropped. Western intelligence had never heard Kim Jong-il speak before, let alone privately and unguarded. It was, he said, an intelligence windfall.
[00:21:37] After a few years in the United States, the couple returned to South Korea. Shin died in 2006, while Choi, his ex-wife turned wife once more, died in 2018.
[00:21:53] They had been taken from their lives, separated for years, imprisoned, forced to remarry, and put to work for a dictator's vanity project. And yet, in a strange way, the years in Pyongyang produced some of the most interesting work of Shin's career.
[00:22:14] A widely acclaimed monster film made with a special effects team from Japan.
[00:22:21] A best actress prize in Moscow.
[00:22:24] Secret recordings of one of the most secretive men on earth.
[00:22:29] And as for Kim Jong-il, he got his films. He just didn't get to keep them.
[00:22:37] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Kim Jong-il and the kidnapped South Korean filmmakers, and with that comes an end to this three-part mini-series on the theme of North Korea.
[00:22:51] South Korea is quite a popular country for this show; North Korea, unsurprisingly, isn’t.
[00:22:57] But if you are from the Korean peninsula, I’d love to know your thoughts. Do you remember the events in this mini-series? And what do you think might lie ahead for the future of North Korea?
[00:23:09] I’d love to know your thoughts, and the place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:23:17] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:22] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today it’s part three of our three-part mini-series on the theme of “stories from North Korea”.
[00:00:31] In case you missed them, in part one, we told the story of Otto Warmbier, the American student who went to North Korea as a tourist and never really came home.
[00:00:44] In part two, we talked about one of the most brazen assassinations of the 21st century: the murder of Kim Jong-un’s half-brother in Kuala Lumpur airport.
[00:00:56] And today, we are going to talk about Kim Jong-il: the dictator, the film fanatic, and the kidnapper of two of South Korea's most famous entertainers.
[00:01:09] OK then, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:15] It’s January 1978.
[00:01:18] A woman called Choi Eun-hee is travelling to Hong Kong. She is one of the most famous actresses in South Korea, a household name, a star of dozens of films. She has been invited to Hong Kong by a contact who has told her about an exciting opportunity: a new film project, and the possibility of running a performing arts academy.
[00:01:47] It sounds promising.
[00:01:49] Her career has been going through a difficult patch, and she is keen to hear more.
[00:01:57] She is taken to a place called Repulse Bay. It is a beautiful beach on the southern coast of Hong Kong island.
[00:02:07] Shortly after she arrives, without warning, she is grabbed by a group of men. She is bundled into a speedboat. Before she can understand what is happening, she is out on the open water, speeding away from Hong Kong.
[00:02:26] Eight days later, she arrives at a port in North Korea.
[00:02:32] She has been kidnapped. And the person who ordered her kidnapping is not a spy chief, not a general, not a faceless bureaucrat. It is Kim Jong-il, the son of North Korea's founder, and the man who will one day become the country's supreme leader.
[00:02:54] He wanted an actress. So he took one.
[00:02:58] Now, to understand why Kim Jong-il might have done this, we need to understand something about the man himself.
[00:03:07] Kim Jong-il was born in 1941, and grew up in the shadow of his father, Kim Il-sung, the all-powerful founder of the North Korean state.
[00:03:21] As you will know, propaganda has always been vital for North Korea, and film has long been one of its most important tools.
[00:03:32] The elder Kim, Kim Il-sung, was keen that his son and heir receive an appropriate education in how to make it.
[00:03:43] So, from his early childhood, he was taken to film studios, introduced to directors and actors, and exposed to the machinery of propaganda production. It didn’t seem to put him off, and he developed what can only be described as an all-consuming passion for cinema.
[00:04:07] By the time he was an adult, he had assembled a personal film collection of around 20,000 titles: everything from James Bond films to the complete works of Elizabeth Taylor, Rambo, Friday the 13th, and all the Academy Award winners.
[00:04:29] Of course, these weren’t available to the North Korean public — foreign films were banned — but the same rules didn’t apply to the Kim family.
[00:04:39] And he would watch these films obsessively, often several in a single sitting.
[00:04:47] But he did not think of himself merely as a consumer. He saw himself as a critic too.
[00:04:55] This even led him to write a book about film theory called On the Art of the Cinema.
[00:05:04] As you might expect of anything the son of Kim Il-sung produced, it was heaped with praise in North Korea, and came to be regarded as the authoritative guide to filmmaking.
[00:05:18] Outside North Korea the reaction was rather less enthusiastic. But perhaps surprisingly enough, even some Western reviewers admitted that it wasn’t all rubbish, and there were some interesting points.
[00:05:34] Kim, it turned out, did know what he was talking about.
[00:05:40] He was also put directly in charge of North Korea's film industry, functioning essentially as the country's chief producer and screenwriter. Every film made in North Korea passed through his hands.
[00:05:56] And he was deeply, painfully, dissatisfied with what his country's studios were producing.
[00:06:04] North Korean cinema, by the 1970s, was exactly what you might expect from a totalitarian state with essentially zero connection to the outside world: stiff, joyless, and relentlessly ideological.
[00:06:21] Every film was a vehicle for propaganda. Every story ended with the triumph of the collective over the individual, the wisdom of the party and the Kim family, and the heroism of the Korean people.
[00:06:37] From a cinematic perspective, it was not exactly Oscar-winning material.
[00:06:43] People also seemed to be constantly bursting out in tears.
[00:06:48] Kim couldn’t quite understand why, and would reportedly complain about this to his directors, telling them that “this isn’t a funeral”.
[00:06:58] Now, for all of his many faults, Kim Jong-il knew a good film when he saw one.
[00:07:06] And he knew the films coming out of North Korea were bad.
[00:07:12] He wanted North Korea to have a film industry that the world would respect, films that could be entered into international festivals and win prizes, films that would make the world look at North Korea differently.
[00:07:29] He knew that what the country was currently producing didn’t stand a chance.
[00:07:35] The problem, he believed, was talent; the country simply didn’t have the directors, producers or actors to make anything decent.
[00:07:47] North Korean filmmakers had long since learned to produce exactly what the state expected: cautious, formulaic propaganda films, often with plenty of tears.
[00:08:01] To be fair, you can understand why. They had no experience of the world beyond North Korea, no understanding of what audiences elsewhere responded to, and no freedom to experiment. If creating something bold and new might mean you get sentenced to decades in a labour camp, well, it’s hardly surprising the machine kept on churning out the same old junk year after year.
[00:08:30] The solution Kim Jong-il arrived at was, in its logic, quite straightforward.
[00:08:37] If North Korean talent was not up to the task, well, he would get talent from elsewhere.
[00:08:45] The most obvious place to look was just across the border. South Korea had a booming film industry which had produced exactly the kind of internationally recognised directors and stars that Kim wanted.
[00:09:00] The director he had in mind was a man called Shin Sang-ok.
[00:09:06] Shin Sang-ok was, by any measure, a remarkable figure. He is often described as the Orson Welles of South Korea. He cut his teeth during the so-called “golden years” of South Korean cinema, in the 1950s and 1960s, and would go on to produce more than 70 films.
[00:09:29] He had founded his own studio, was internationally recognised, he was a huge name.
[00:09:37] He was also, by 1978, in a difficult position.
[00:09:43] His studio had been shut down by the South Korean government, which had grown uncomfortable with some of his work. His career had stalled.
[00:09:54] And on a personal level, things weren’t particularly rosy either.
[00:10:01] His wife of 22 years had divorced him, after finding out about a series of affairs and infidelities. Clearly, this must have been difficult, as it would have been for anyone.
[00:10:15] But this was made even more so by the fact that his now ex-wife, a woman called Choi Eun-hee, had been the lead actress in many of his films.
[00:10:28] This, of course, was the same Choi you heard about at the start of the episode.
[00:10:35] Kim Jong-il knew all of this. And he had a plan.
[00:10:42] The plan didn’t start with a telephone call to Shin and promises that a spell in North Korea would give his career the boost it so desperately needed; persuasion wasn’t exactly Kim’s style.
[00:10:56] The plan began with Choi, Shin’s ex-wife. She was the easier target, and her abduction would serve as bait.
[00:11:07] Once she had disappeared, Kim thought, Shin would come looking for her. And when he did, they would take him too.
[00:11:18] And that is precisely what happened.
[00:11:22] Shin Sang-ok heard that his ex-wife had disappeared in Hong Kong. He was worried, and he flew there to investigate. North Korean agents were waiting. He was seized, put on a boat, and taken to North Korea.
[00:11:40] He wasn’t told that Choi was already there. And in fact, she would have no idea that he was there for several years.
[00:11:50] What followed, for both of them, was an ordeal that combined elements of luxury captivity, political re-education, imprisonment and, eventually, something resembling a forced professional collaboration.
[00:12:07] Choi's experience in the early years was more comfortable than Shin's.
[00:12:12] She was housed in a well-kept villa, taken to films and operas and parties, given a private tutor to teach her about North Korean ideology, and treated, in certain respects, as a guest rather than a prisoner.
[00:12:30] Kim Jong-il asked her for her opinions on films. He took notes. He wanted to learn from her. He also, it appears, enjoyed her company. She must have been something of a breath of fresh air.
[00:12:45] Shin's experience was considerably worse.
[00:12:49] He tried to escape twice. On the second attempt, he was caught just twenty five kilometres from the Chinese border. He had almost made it, but it wasn’t to be.
[00:13:03] He was sent to a political prison, where he spent more than two years being subjected to interrogation, starvation, and ideological re-education. This involved, as he would later recall, hours upon hours of propaganda films, political lectures, and being forced to write confessions of his ideological errors.
[00:13:29] And then, in March 1983, Kim Jong-il threw a dinner party.
[00:13:37] Both Choi and Shin were brought to the same room. Neither knew the other was in North Korea, and of course, neither of them had had any access to the outside world, no way to know anything about the fate of the other.
[00:13:56] The reunion was deeply emotional. The pair stood looking at each other, unsure what would happen next. And then, moments later, Kim Jong-il walked in.
[00:14:11] He was, by the accounts of both Shin and Choi, not what they had expected.
[00:14:17] Yes, he looked like his official photos: short in stature, platform shoes, and with that fluffy, bouffant hair.
[00:14:27] But he was also energetic, full of strong opinions, and in his own way, kind of charming. He apologised for the circumstances of their arrival. He expressed his admiration for their work. He explained his vision for North Korean cinema and what he hoped they would help him achieve.
[00:14:52] He also, rather extraordinarily, suggested they remarry. He planned to officiate the ceremony himself. They had little choice but to agree, and the wedding took place the following month.
[00:15:08] And then the work began.
[00:15:10] From 1984 to 1985, Shin Sang-ok directed seven films in North Korea.
[00:15:18] Kim Jong-il gave him resources he had not had in years: a studio, a budget, a crew, and, crucially, a degree of creative freedom that had never previously been afforded to his filmmakers.
[00:15:33] Although he was, of course, the dictator of a harsh, authoritarian regime, Kim understood on some level that if he wanted North Korean films to be able to compete internationally, he needed to loosen the reins a little bit. If every scene, every frame, was dictated by strict propaganda requirements, even the best filmmaker in the world wouldn’t be able to produce anything decent.
[00:16:03] And the results were, well, they were pretty good.
[00:16:08] A film called Salt, which was directed by Shin and starred Choi, it won Choi the best actress prize at the 1985 Moscow International Film Festival.
[00:16:21] Another was entered into a festival in what was then Czechoslovakia.
[00:16:26] For a brief, strange period, North Korean cinema was producing work that was being noticed.
[00:16:35] But the most famous work from this period was the 1985 epic monster film, Pulgasari.
[00:16:45] It's a film modelled on the Japanese classic Godzilla, in which a giant iron-eating creature is summoned by a dying blacksmith and goes on to help a peasant rebellion.
[00:16:59] Shin brought in special effects technicians from the Japanese studio that made the original Godzilla films, and even hired the actor who wore the Godzilla costume in Japan.
[00:17:13] In terms of collaboration, it is a real historical peculiarity: a North Korean propaganda film made by a kidnapped South Korean director using a Japanese special effects team.
[00:17:29] It has become, in its way, a cult classic.
[00:17:34] It is also a monument to the sheer strangeness of what was happening in those years in Pyongyang.
[00:17:42] But, no matter the resources they were afforded and the international acclaim they may have been starting to receive, Shin and Choi had no intention of spending the rest of their lives in North Korea.
[00:17:57] Ever since that first dinner party, the pair had been quietly planning their escape.
[00:18:04] The opportunity came in 1986. Kim Jong-il sent Shin and Choi to Vienna, in Austria, to seek financial backing for a new international co-production: a film about Genghis Khan.
[00:18:21] The trip was supervised by North Korean minders, of course. But it was Vienna. It was the outside world.
[00:18:30] During a meeting with a journalist, the minders agreed to wait outside and give them some privacy. The couple seized the opportunity. They ran out and jumped into a taxi.
[00:18:45] But there was heavy traffic, and they could see their minders frantically rushing towards them.
[00:18:53] If they were caught, well, they would no doubt be on the first plane back to North Korea, sent straight to a prison camp, and would never be allowed out of the country again.
[00:19:06] The couple decided their only chance was on foot. They got out of the taxi and sprinted towards the American embassy.
[00:19:17] They made it, and immediately sought political asylum, saying that they had been kidnapped; they hadn’t gone to the north voluntarily, as they had previously publicly stated.
[00:19:29] Kim Jong-il, of course, was furious. He accused them of embezzling money intended for the Genghis Khan film, 3 million dollars. He banned all their North Korean films from being shown in the country.
[00:19:46] The work they had spent years producing was, from the regime's perspective, now toxic.
[00:19:55] As for Shin and Choi, they spent a couple of years in the United States living quietly under protection.
[00:20:03] But quietly didn't mean inactively.
[00:20:07] They had spent years closer to Kim Jong-il than almost any outsider ever had, sharing meals with him, discussing film, and watching him hold court. And Western intelligence agencies were extremely keen to understand what that experience had revealed about the man.
[00:20:30] And it turned out that Shin and Choi had been preparing for exactly this moment.
[00:20:37] Throughout their time in captivity, they had been carefully and secretly recording their conversations with Kim Jong-il, not primarily for intelligence purposes, but to protect themselves, To have proof, if they ever made it out, that they had not gone north voluntarily.
[00:20:59] Using a hidden device, they captured hours of him talking about film, about North Korea, about his own frustrations with the country's cultural output.
[00:21:11] Unguarded, candid, speaking freely to people he trusted.
[00:21:18] One American official who heard the tapes said his jaw dropped. Western intelligence had never heard Kim Jong-il speak before, let alone privately and unguarded. It was, he said, an intelligence windfall.
[00:21:37] After a few years in the United States, the couple returned to South Korea. Shin died in 2006, while Choi, his ex-wife turned wife once more, died in 2018.
[00:21:53] They had been taken from their lives, separated for years, imprisoned, forced to remarry, and put to work for a dictator's vanity project. And yet, in a strange way, the years in Pyongyang produced some of the most interesting work of Shin's career.
[00:22:14] A widely acclaimed monster film made with a special effects team from Japan.
[00:22:21] A best actress prize in Moscow.
[00:22:24] Secret recordings of one of the most secretive men on earth.
[00:22:29] And as for Kim Jong-il, he got his films. He just didn't get to keep them.
[00:22:37] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on Kim Jong-il and the kidnapped South Korean filmmakers, and with that comes an end to this three-part mini-series on the theme of North Korea.
[00:22:51] South Korea is quite a popular country for this show; North Korea, unsurprisingly, isn’t.
[00:22:57] But if you are from the Korean peninsula, I’d love to know your thoughts. Do you remember the events in this mini-series? And what do you think might lie ahead for the future of North Korea?
[00:23:09] I’d love to know your thoughts, and the place for that is our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com.
[00:23:17] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:22] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
